MAKING CONNECTIONS

            This past Monday, two disparate but dovetailing print snippets caught my eye. The first, from the Wilmington, NC, StarNews, was about a lawsuit brought against one of the area’s industrial hog farms for “…persistent dumping of hog waste into” the Neuse River watershed. The second was the epigraph to Chapter 12 of Greg Mortensen and David Oliver Relin’s Three Cups of Tea, which details Mortensen’s struggles to build schools in the Baltistan region of Pakistan.

            You connected pig poop with Pakistani schools? you ask.

            Well, yes. Read on.



Hog-waste lagoon
flooded by 1999's Hurricane Floyd

            Problems with hog waste disposal are not new to eastern North Carolina. Typically, the tons of pig excrement produced by concentrated animal feedlot operations (CAFOs) is collected, thinned with water, then stored in huge above-ground structures euphemistically called “lagoons.” There is currently no environmentally sound or commercially feasible use for the noxious slurry. Mostly it leaches into the ground. Eventually. A rumor persists that the USDA has research teams working around the clock to alchemize this crap into some kind of gold. Be that as it may, during the epic flooding caused by Hurricane Floyd in 1999, dozens of lagoons breached, inundating acres of land and tributaries of the Cape Fear and Neuse Rivers with skillions of gallons of the stinky stuff, an environmental disaster downplayed with great skill by local media who know on which side their bacon is buttered.

Arguably, it’s one thing when the powers-that-be can blame an act of god. It’s something else entirely when CAFOs regularly thumb their noses at the federal Clean Water and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Acts. Industrial agriculture, like Wall Street, Big Business and the NRA, calls the shots, because our elected “representatives” are willing to sell their souls and our futures to the highest bidder just to stay in office.

Well, enough political rant. It just gets me all het up, raises my blood-pressure and serves no useful purpose beyond venting. The frustration itself remains.



The second bit of print that sparked this diatribe speaks to what we, as individuals, as gardeners, can do in the face of the Big Boys. (This is where Pakistan comes in.) Attributed to Helena Norberg-Hodge, founder and director of the International Society for Ecology and Culture, the epigraph that caught my eye goes like this: “…our search for a future that works keeps spiraling back to an ancient connection between ourselves and the earth.” (Emphasis mine.)



Helena Norberg-Hodge

The continuing hog waste debacle, and how profit for the few trumps the well-being of the many, got me thinking about synthetic fertilizers. Connections!

Let me tell you a story.

Until the end of World War I, farmers everywhere used only composted manures, kitchen-and-garden wastes, and seaweed to amend their fields. That’s all they had. Recycling wasn’t some hippie-tree-hugger pipedream, it was both an economic necessity and the only course of action that made sense. Once hostilities ceased in 1918, however, armaments manufacturers faced severe income losses. Some bright soul, probably noting the lush plant growth at his factory’s out-flow, figured out that the same ingredients used to make big booms—nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium—also enhance crop performance (kind of Timothy McVeigh reasoning in reverse). Tim says he can almost see the foremen on the packaging floors yelling “Stop!” and manhandling big valves closed, bringing the clattering lines to a stand-still. They produce bags and boxes with different, unwarlike labels, and install them on the filling machines. “Okay, start ’er up!” they cry while reopening the valves.

Toss in an aggressive marketing campaign, and day dawns on the commercial fertilizer industry.



Better living through chemisry...

Crop yields rise dramatically the first several years. But over time, so do pest problems and soil depletion. (Can you spell “Dust Bowl”?) Why? The new, “chemical” plant foods come formulated as salts that, once in the soil, have to break down in the presence of water before their nutrients are available to plants. The salty by-products of this reaction don’t magically disappear from the soil: they accumulate. Exposure to excessive salt causes the soil microbiota that form the base of our food chain to dehydrate and die. That’s why, once you start using synthetics, you have to keep on using them, and more of them, because their mode of action essentially renders the “fertilized” soil sterile.

The whole concept seems rather stupid when put that way, doesn’t it?



...and gene splicing

Eager to accelerate the environmental mess they'd fomented, the armaments guys—now with names like DuPont, Bayer Crop Science, Monsanto, Dow Agrochemical, Scotts, and Ortho—got into the pesticide business as well. Now they could poison fish and birds and whole ecosystems as well as bacteria and fungi. Bottom lines burgeoned.

Okay, I’m being a tad over-dramatic here, but you get the idea. Taking the non-blame-laying path, one could say the early days of “Better living through chemistry” had myriad unintended consequences. Anybody out there besides me old enough to remember DDT and Rachel Carson? I’m just not too sure about the “unintendedness” of the consequences of agri-business practices today. The politics of genetically modified organisms, especially the ones we eat, is a subject for another day.



Soil science made understandable

The point of all this is, as gardeners in our own little yards, in our own community gardens, on our own town’s streets and medians and parking lots, our first responsibility is to the soil. Without healthy, living dirt, ultimately we got bupkis.

For me, the eureka moment came during a class on soils Tim and I attended, opening my eyes to the notion of feeding the soil instead of the plants. Then I read Teaming with Microbes: A Gardener’s Guide to the Soil Food Web by Jeff Lowenfels and Wayne Lewis (see “Good Reads” on the sidebar). The obviousness of how everything in nature connects moved to the forefront of my consciousness. "Never send to know for whom the bell tolls," John Donne warned centuries ago. "It tolls for thee."
 

Biodegradable BioBags

 I started a compost pile. We've reduced the amount of garbage set out on the curb each week to one bio-bag of dry stuff: the rest we turn into food for our dirt. I stopped buying fertilizers with high N-P-K numbers. I cadged shredded leaves from a client to use as mulch (he was going to throw them out!). You already know I remove weeds by pulling them. When it comes to pests, I practice prevention: right plant, right place makes a lot of difference. When damage exceeds acceptable limits, control starts with mechanical means—a jar of soapy water, the bottom of my shoe, transportation to the birdfeeder—or with low-residual-impact products like insecticidal soap and horticultural oil. We installed rain barrels. Tim uses an electric lawnmower. And the lawn gets smaller every year as I add new beds.

There’s no point in hand-wringing and moaning about not being able to make a real difference. No, we’re not going to bring the military-industrial complex to its knees by practicing sane horticulture on our little patches… not in this century, anyway. But we can change our attitudes. Little connections become clear, little adjustments follow.

“Only connect!” E.M. Forster exhorts us in Howards End. “Live in fragments no longer.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Thanks for dropping by. Wanna hear about my adventures in composting next time?

                                                                                                    Kathy

RANTING AND RAVING

            On Wednesday of this week, Tim suggested I practice what I preach and become a follower of a few other gardening blogs. I demurred (remember the depression my scroll through www.digindirt.com caused? If you don’t, it’s detailed in the “Bits and Pieces” post of December 2). He gently persisted, patiently leading me through the mechanics of locating lists of the gazillions of relevant sites, enthusiastically extolling the many advantages of linking to other people’s natterings, and having them provide links to mine. I am easily overwhelmed when it comes to the WorldWideWeb. A headache started tickling my temples. As my eyes glazed over, Tim quickly clicked to “A List of 50 Top Gardening Blogs by Blog Rank” to circumvent the imminent trance-state.

             I snapped to, for a little while. The site ranks the top 50 gardening blogs, all right… by 20 different criteria (some of which I actually understood) and in ten different lists. That’s only 500 possibles to reduce to two or three that I might enjoy following. Kids’ stuff, right?



A graphic representation
of how I feel about finding
other blogs to follow,
by Edvard Munch

            Insert primal scream here.

            Some of the site names seemed familiar, so I opened the one that had most intruded onto my consciousness. That would be the venerable “Garden Rant.” The lead post was one of the four founders whining, in very choppy sentences, about the fate of the citrus trees she’d brought inside for the winter. I sympathize—my own experience with houseplants suggests she may be a kindred spirit—but there was so much other stuff going on I got distracted. Extensive sidebars flanked the text on both sides, minimizing it. Animated ads; plugs for products, books and green political action groups; author bios; accolades from print sources; paeans from devotees; long lists of followers, sponsors and indexed topics; contests; awards announcements; and more detracted from what I, passé idiot that I am, had supposed to be the point of garden blogging. 

            Call me old-fashioned, but there’s got to be a less strident way of communicating. Is it no longer possible for like-minded people to have a quiet online exchange of ideas without one or both of them trying to sell the other something?

            By Friday evening, searching for possible-soul-mate bloggers felt like pouring time down the toilet, by the gallon. You may remember my status as a neo-Luddite (see “My Blog and Welcome to It” of November 4, 2010). I do not now enjoy nor have I ever enjoyed surfing the Net. Way leads on to way, sites are difficult (for me) to navigate, clicking and clicking and clicking to no useful purpose. I’d almost rather be cleaning the house. I’d certainly rather be writing.

An official Garden Rant blog logo





             Nonetheless, because I have a stubborn streak the breadth of Montana, and because I love my husband very much and want to please him, I stuck with it for several hours over multiple sessions. What follows is the upshot.

     1.  Many bloggers apparently have no surnames. Others have no Christian names (or whatever religion—I’m a lapsed WASP and it shows), only what can best be described as aliases, often preciously misspelt. This reticence to state-your-name raises red flags for me. What are they hiding? Or, alternatively, what are they hiding from? Are they ashamed? Are they promulgating lies? Are they Ted Kaczyinski clones or Raelians? Are they members of a Witness Protection Program? Sure, I have deep-rooted trust issues when it comes to cyber-space, but, by golly, if you know my name you’d best be prepared to tell me yours.

2.      Plenty of the sites I visited are unattractively aggressive about extolling the virtues and/or products of the writer. Of course, personality shines through all non-fiction writing (I specify non-fiction because I devoutly hope Stephen King’s output doesn’t open a window onto his soul): but relentless self-promotion sets my teeth on edge. Could I be envious of bloggers like Amy Stewart, whose blog “Dirt” trumpets Amy's publishing triumphs, Amy's indie bookstore, upcoming media events starring Amy and links to New York Times articles featuring Amy? Absolutely. But my Southern upbringing militates against the virtual equivalent of balancing on one foot atop a roof peak shouting, “Look at ME! Look at ME!” Call it a 21^st-century character flaw.

3.      Some sites I clicked and clicked and clicked through and rejected:

·         “Sustainable and Urban Gardening” by Susan Harris, one of the founders of “Garden Rant” and a suburban Washington, D.C., garden coach, a self-bestowed title that rated an immediate black mark in KathyWorld. In my opinion, “coach” is a term reserved for sports, not life, and definitely not gardening. Do we also have gardening cheerleaders? (That’s a rhetorical question. I fear the answer.)

·         “GardenGateBlog” by I-don’t-know-who. This one’s a navigation nightmare. Dozens of clicks got me confused, fast.

·         “This Garden Is Illegal” by Hanna in Cleveland. Aside from having no last name, Hanna committed the unforgiveable sin of using “peaks” when she meant “piques.” Gave me shudders.

·         “A Gal Growing Southern” by Nelumbo out of Savannah. Intrigued because Tim and I love Savannah, the lack of positive ID and the precious “Gal” of the title got this one a thumbs-down. Must we all be cute all the time?





Many thanks to Mr. McPherson



Despair not—despite the stringent requirements, I found some sites to follow. There are probably many more, but my tolerance ran out for winnowing the kernels from the enormous amount of chaff that fills the blogosphere. Plus, we really, really have to take down the Christmas tree today, before we make the Nargleys' tradition our own (many thanks to Mr. McPherson).



I really liked Noel Kingsbury’s “Noel’s Garden Blog.” He writes from Hay-on-Wye in the Welsh border country of the UK, and snarkily referred to “organic jihadists” in his profile. That and the beautiful lead-picture garden hooked me, and I pledged to be a faithful follower, even if it means spending more time in cyber-space.

I would also like to sign on to the androgynous M. Sinclair Stevens’ “Zanthan Garden,” out of Austin, Texas. Alas, her (his?) weblog is not friendly to point-and-click following, but he (she?) lists her (his?) email address—all in words, no symbols, an endearing trait—so I shall contact him (her?) directly and hope I don’t end up a victim of her (his?) spam filter.



Lead photo from
Noels Garden Blog
(he left out the apostrophe, not me)

 Finally, I subscribed to Cathy Fitzgerald’s (cool “coincidence” about the name, eh?) EcoArtNews site. We share interests in trees and conservation, as I found out when she signed up to follow me yesterday. There was great rejoicing in Oak Island, I can tell you, that someone I don’t actually know—and from Ireland, no less—finds “Gardening from the Ground Up” follow-worthy. Cath even left a comment after the “Winter Weeds” post, as inspiration to the rest of you.

Please feel free to suggest other blogs you think might meet my criteria of full name disclosure, a firm grasp of the intricacies of the English language, no hit-you-over-the-head selling, and ease of access. Please feel free to make any suggestions, about anything at all. Please feel free.

Thanks for dropping by. I’m turning off the computer now. See you next time.

                                                                      Kathy

           

WINTER WEEDS

            I have a love/hate relationship with weeds.

Poa annua
Annual bluegrass



On the one hand, you have to admire their indomitable tenacity in the face of intensive cultivation. Their ability to assume the habit and color of the plant whose water and nutrients they're stealing intrigues me. Who knew plants could manage camouflage? Weeds also often produce flowers of startling delicacy and loveliness.

On the other hand, they siphon resources that gardeners prefer be dedicated to the exclusive use of the planted plants, which is, at base, what defines a weed.

Aphorisms about weeds abound. “A weed is just a plant in the wrong place,” according to some wags. Others maintain something like “A weed by any other name is a native plant.” True enough, but oh, puh-leeze. “Weeds are in the eye of the beholder” is another one. It makes sense that “One gardener’s weed is another gardener’s treasure”: some plants I wouldn’t have in my yard on a bet are sold in other parts of the country as valuable garden additions—showy evening primrose (Oenothera speciosa), Virginia creeper, Smilax (otherwise known as pernicious cat briar), purslane, Dichondra and mullein, to name a few. As a child, my favorite flowers—I gathered great fistfuls of them for my mom—were fuzzy purple henbit blooms, sweet-smelling white or pink globes of clover, and pungent dandelions. Even now I love to see great sweeps of blue-blooming oldfield toadflax and red sorrel in fallow fields. 



Capsella bursa-pastoris
Shepherdspurse



That doesn’t mean I welcome them in my yard.

            On the southeastern coast, mild winters ensure two crops of annual weeds a year—the cool-season ones and the warm-season ones. Chickweeds (oh, yes, there are several), annual bluegrass, sow thistles, oldfield toadflax, shepherdspurse, Carolina cranesbill and blue-eyed grass start appearing in late fall and persist until the ground warms up. Crabgrass, poorjoe, bindweed, Florida pusley, sand spurs, sesbanias, chamberbitter and the whole spurge clan show up as the winter weeds begin to fade, and don’t give up until soil temperatures drop again. The thing all these thorns-in-our-sides have in common is that they reproduce by seeds dropped as they die. Ergo, pulling them before or just as they start to flower is crucial to reducing populations. You won’t ever get them all, but vigilance does pay off.

You should also know that some weed seeds can lie dormant in the soil for decades. Every time dirt gets disturbed, new weeds sprout. Isn’t nature marvelous?



Stellaria media
Common chickweed

Southeasterners also get separate crops of warm- and cool-season perennial weeds each year. Examples include creeping and yellow woodsorrels, Florida betony, cool-weather and warm-weather sedges, fleabane, dog fennel, common vetch, threeflower beggarweed, broadleaf plantain (not the banana relative) and the dreaded pennywort. Viney perennials include Virginia creeper, cat briar, kudzu and, most feared of all, poison ivy, oak and sumac. Most spread by rhizomes; all are difficult to eliminate. The tiniest bit of plant left behind in the soil regenerates—rather like the dragon’s teeth of myth—into 15 new plants by the following season. Or, if you're talking Florida betony and pennywort, by the following week. Still, if you keep pulling and pulling and pulling the top-growth, photosynthetic processes falter, and eventually even cat briar starves to death.



Top: Gnaphalium spicatum
Shiny cudweed
Bottom: Stellaria media
Common chickweed



Sometimes plants not normally considered weeds elbow their way into the category, like Coreopsis grandiflora. The lovely golden-yellow daisy flowers of the four plants I idiotically put in my small garden delighted me their first season with a long and prolific bloom time. What I wasn’t to know until the following spring is that coreopsis seeds have about a 130% germination rate. For the next five years, I pulled up thousands of seedlings, all over my yard and the neighbors’. Other herbaceous plants to keep a close watch on include bee balm (Monarda spp.), passionflower vine (Passiflora incarnata) and Texas or hardy ageratum (Eupatorium coelestinum), a single plant of which turned nightmarishly thuggish in my garden.

Some woodies also spawn unwanted seedlings and suckers: heavenly bamboo (Nandina domestica, considered invasive in Florida, like almost everything else), crape myrtle, wax myrtle, wisteria, pine trees and oaks (squirrels get most of the credit for these last). Deal with these pseudo-weeds the same way as the more traditional ones: pull, pull, pull.



Lamium amplexicaule
Henbit

 Now, I’ve used the names of several common weeds in the preceding paragraphs. I know what they look like, foliage, flowers and roots. I bet many of you don’t. I wouldn’t want to hang from a rope of poison ivy while you decided if a specimen might be a woodsorrel, a henbit, a threeflower beggarweed or that enormously expensive designer perennial you planted last fall. Tim and I often hear the plaintive refrain, “I didn’t know if it was a weed or not.” Well, I don’t always know, either. Ignorance gives us two choices: 1) let the thing grow to the point where you can identify it as something you planted (or not), usually when it flowers; or 2) pull it out and then watch to see if something you may have planted in or around that spot comes up (or not). I usually opt for the former tactic, because I rearrange my garden so regularly that, despite my garden journal and the little maps I draw (but fail to update), more often than not any given seedling’s provenance is a mystery. 





Pyrrhopappus carolinianus
Carolina falsedandelion

  You’ll notice I haven’t mentioned herbicides as away to get rid of weeds. That’s because I won’t use them. I also understand that you aren't me. But please, go easy on the Roundup and the brush killer, okay? Instead, spend a little quality time out in your garden when the ground is dampish, removing the buggers by hand. Target the ones with flowers, as you really don’t want seed for next year’s crop to ripen and fall. As a card-carrying anti-sprayite, I also weed our lawn by hand, which means we have a lot of creeping sorrel, spurges, sedges and the occasional sandspur in the grass. But that’s okay. I consider it acceptable damage, and it pleases me not to be pouring glyphosate or worse into the ocean.

 

Gnaphalium pennsylvanicum
Wandering cudweed



Speaking of herbicides, a disturbing phenomenon has been noted by the people whose business it is to notice such things. Some weeds have developed resistance to herbicides in the same way some insects have evolved tolerances for common insecticides. This situation arises through pesticide overuse, in the same way human superbugs come from overprescribed antibiotics. Don’t get me started on Monsanto, DuPont and the “better living through chemistry” boys engineering mutant corn and soybeans with genetic resistance to weed killers. Why? So field crops survive blanket-sprayed herbicides. So now, in addition to unknowingly consuming genetically altered food, we can ingest massive doses of glyphosates too! 



Sonchus asper
Spiny sowthistle



So please—for your sake, for my sake, for the planet’s sake—think very hard before you spray anything. And before buying anything produced by Monsanto, DuPont, Dow Agrichemical, Bayer Crop Science, etc., etc., etc.

            You probably will not be too astounded to learn that I actually enjoy weeding. I like the intimacy of it, the deep satisfaction engendered by teasing out a particularly long runner of pennywort, the thrill of tugging out a threeflower beggarweed with its taproot intact.

            Hand-weeding is my way of giving the plants I’ve chosen first dibs on available water and nutrients. It is also one of the very few activities resulting in instant gratification in the gardening world.

A personal plea: will my Slovenian reader please leave a comment? I can't tell you how thrilled I am when your country's name pops up on my daily readers stats list!

Thanks for dropping by. See you next time.

                                                                    Kathy

DECEMBER WRAP-UP

            Well, the weather outside is less frightful, the weekend’s supposed to be delightful. Nonetheless, with Wilmington clocking 26 consecutive days of below-average temperatures, this December ranks as the coldest in 135 years. (The government only started keeping systematic records in 1875, so we don’t know about the countless millennia before then.) Oak Island shivered through 19 sub-freezing nights, compared to the average four-and-a-half, according to my own eight years of recording observations.

            A seemingly endless round of low-pressure systems rolls in from the west, sucking in frigid air from Canada. My son Sam returns to McGill University in Montreal next week: I hope there’s some cold left for him up there. My son Sean is in Brooklyn, digging out from the 24 to 30 inches of snow dumped by the Christmas Blizzard of 2010. Makes me think I should stop whining about local weather. Here, as in every other facet of life on Earth, someone somewhere has it worse than I do. Probably much worse, because I’ve led one astoundingly lucky life.

            So far.

                    December 10^th’s post, “Stuffing Stockings,” got the most hits this month. Hope it was helpful. Not that I’d know for sure, because comments are few and far between, although pageview stats climb steadily. I thank you all very much—especially my fan in Slovenia—but I’d really, really like some feedback. Nothing bad happens if you post a comment. You won’t go to hell. Plus, it’s easy. At the bottom of every post is a box entitled “Post a Comment.” You move your cursor inside the box and type something, perhaps a flattering remark about what joy this well-written blog brings you, enquiries about my astrological sign or hair color, a story about your community garden or gardening community, your pickleworm phobia, your astrological sign or hair color, whatever. I’m into dialogue, y’all. As long as I don’t have to use the telephone, which I despise more than pickleworms.

 

            I’ll lay into you about signing on as followers next month, if this comments tirade helps.

            Let’s see, what else? I did, in fact, manage to catch a part of the lunar eclipse. Being of a certain age, I generally have to get up once during the night to visit the bathroom. On December 21^st, the bladder call happened at 4 a.m. “What the heck?” I thought, so I bundled up and tiptoed out to our back deck. The eclipse had started to recede, so there was a crescent of white light topping the otherwise dusky red globe. I must have stood there, agog, in that strange light for almost ten minutes. Then Petey the Possum lumbered up under the potting table to check for scraps of catfood Rocky and Rowena Raccoon may have missed, breaking my reverie. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not afraid of Petey, but maintain a healthy respect for his status as a wild creature.

            The pallet of 50 25-pound bags of Black Kow I asked Santa for failed to materialize, alas. I was hoping to use them to counteract the pound of dark-chocolate-covered macaroons and the dozen coconut igloos that were waiting for me under the tree. Guess I’ll have to keep schlepping 50-pounders of Kow around one or two at a time.



            Houseplant status report: the Solanum pseudocapsicum is totally defoliated. Turned out it had an infestation of little green caterpillars. Two soakings with Safer Insecticidal Soap at ten-day intervals took care of them, but it was too late for the leaves. The plant sits in its corner of the Fitzgerald Kitchen of Death, looking rather minimalistically sculptural with its orange fruits and bare green stems. I find I prefer it this way: beats the daily dustpan-full of crunchy leaves and caterpillar poop. Some tiny new leaves are starting to unfurl, stoking hopes of ultimate survival. 

The defoliated yet sculptural
Solanum pseudocapsicum



            A few caterpillars tried a change of address to the verbena/pentas pot, but a single shot of Safer quashed that tactic. Both plants continue hanging in.

            The dahlia drowned. The mango sprout damped off.

            Incredibly, the poinsettia still has most of its foliage and to date hasn’t lost a single red bract. This is little short of a Christmas miracle. All other specimens of the uber-hybridized Mexican beauty sentenced to a holiday term chez Fitz give up within three weeks. The current season’s mutant is a month old and going strong. It's true—wonders never cease.

 

Aha! It's a
Physalis heterophylla,
a clammy ground cherry



            The tapeworm fern is holding its own, even sporting some new shoots. Our cat Three (it’s a long story) keeps trying to ingest it, but every time she does, she has to throw it up within minutes. I know this because the vomit spots are all in the immediate environs of the piano upon which the plant sits. This behavior raises doubts as to exactly how smart this wily old feline survivor really is



            The papayas are both doing very well indeed, recovering nicely from their initial shock defoliation. I attribute this amazing turn of events to the fact that both were spared any time at all in the Kitchen of Death, and weekly doses of Super-Thrive.

            The biggest houseplant story of December, however, involves that mystery plant I asked you for help in identifying. Well, never mind. I found it in on page 47 of the February 2011 issue of Garden Gate, in the “Weed Watch” section. It’s a clammy ground cherry, Physalis heterophylla. Leave it to me to attempt to overwinter a weed. The plant itself succumbed last weekend, but I’ve kept some seeds. Hey, a weed’s only a weed if you don’t like it, right?



 

Gulf fritillary caterpillar
munching on passionflower foliage



            This out-of-the-clear-blue-sky plant identification happens to me quite a bit, mainly because I read a lot of gardening magazines. The other instance I remember with crystal clarity is when I learned the name of the ugly orange-with-black-spines caterpillars eating the life out of the passionflower adorning our outdoor shower. I keep back issues of various magazines in the bathroom, so that no minute goes by without its opportunity for expanding horizons. On this occasion, I picked up a three-year-old copy of The American Gardener, and opened it at random. Well, slap my ass and call me pinky, there was a picture of the wriggly creatures devastating my vine. They were the larvae of Gulf fritillary butterflies!

            I don’t really believe in coincidence. Tim and I had been batting the idea of killing the little things back and forth when I felt the need to use the convenience. And voilà! It would be spooky if it didn’t happen so often.

            The seed catalogs are rolling in. Comstock Seeds, Burpee’s, and Cooks Garden have arrived, along with a new Gardens Alive! offering 25% off KaBluey blueberry plants. I’m already salivating, having spent four dollars for six ounces of the antioxidant powerhouses from Argentina just yesterday. (It was for a party—I don't normally buy non-U.S. produce, and try to keep purchases to what’s in season. Which, at this time of year, is practically nothing.)

            Thanks for dropping by. Take the plunge and leave a brief comment, okay? See you in the New Year.

                                                                                                  Kathy

'TIS THE SEASON FOR EXCUSES

          Welcome back! Hope you all had yourselves merry little Christmases. I enjoyed the time off from the computer, but am happy to be typing away again this afternoon.  



          I had my teeth cleaned this morning. Because I take really good care of my choppers and don’t suffer from excessive dentophobia, it was an enjoyable experience. In the course of conversation, such as it is with someone else’s hands in your mouth, the hygienist, Jamie, mentioned her 15-year-old daughter had made an insightful comment a few days ago. “Mom,” she’d said, “the whole Christmas season is just one big excuse. An excuse to buy whatever you want, eat whatever you want, drink whatever you want and it’s all okay because it’s Christmas.”

Desolation in the vegetable garden

            Out of the mouths of babes.

            This past weekend, a good chunk of the East Coast disappeared under a blanket of snow, which is a big deal here in the South. Raleigh enjoyed—if that’s the word—its first white Christmas in over six decades; Atlanta had plodded through green Yules for more than a century until this year. Having lived in upstate New York for 20 years, I know for a fact, Der Bingle notwithstanding, white Christmases are overrated. Oak Island escaped any significant accumulation, although flakes filtered down desultorily out of a pensive grey sky all of Boxing Day, only to melt upon contact with our unfrozen ground. Sunday chores being Sunday chores regardless of weather, I went outside to feed the birds, turn the compost and go walkabout. Brought the camera along to capture the garden in solemn mode.



Passiflora, past

            “What a mess,” I thought, peering through the viewfinder.


            Pitiful remains of once glorious passionflower, sere, brittle stalks of various genera of daisies, liatris and amsonias, veronica and butterfly weed, false indigo and sea holly, daylilies and phlox, cannas and crinums crackled underfoot. The semi-woody stems of my humongous seashore mallow (Kosteletzkya virginica) creaked querulously in the no-nonsense northwest wind. The hodge-podginess of the assemblage struck me, hard.

            I’ve neglected my own garden for the past few years. When I paw through my not-very-well-organized photo files searching for pictures for articles and such, shots of the glory days of the middle part of this decade reproach me.

            Fortunately, I have lots of excuses. 

The garden glory days



1.      I’m too busy. I work at gardening for others, I do all our business and personal paperwork, I’m Fitzgeralds Gardening’s CFO. I write articles for magazines and this blog. I keep journals. I spend hours on the phone every month with my kids and my female relatives. (Okay, not so much with the boys these days. Little buggers went and got their own lives.) I email a lot, and in the form of real letters, complete with greetings and closings, indented paragraphs, correct spelling, and complete sentences. I subscribe to six gardening magazines and The Writer. I buy books like they’re going out of style. I’m addicted to BBC cozy mysteries. My Monday-through-Saturday home chores include doing dishes and laundry, and what passes for the weekly houseclean. (F.Y.I., Tim does all the cooking, maintains both our trucks and the mechanical house systems, mows the lawn and cleans the litter box. Everything else we share, except the ironing. Nobody does that.)

2.      I’m too old. I get tired easier. I get cranky easier. I choose not to go outside when it’s too hot. I refuse to go outside when it’s too cold. My knees are getting creaky. I have one dodgy elbow. Those 50-pound bags of Kow don’t get any lighter.

3.      I’m too disorganized. Whatever tool I want is invariably somewhere else. I don’t always remember just where I put it last, either.

4.      I’m too distractible. I frequently have trouble making myself stick to finishing one task before dithering off to tend to some other, usually unrelated, little job. (Ask Tim for corroboration. This trait of mine drives him nuts.)

5.      Nature is against me. After all, she invented mosquitoes, fleas, biting flies, no-see-ums, pickleworms, sand spurs and poison ivy.

            Standing amidst the wreckage of my garden, I heaved a deep, discouraged sigh.


Defiant Lycoris radiata
in front of  frozen Siberian iris



But then I looked closer, and the line from Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” came to mind: “If winter comes, can spring be far behind?”

            In front of a frozen clump of Siberian iris, graceful white-striped blades of Lycoris radiata (spider lily) foliage defied all of this December’s miserable weather. Likewise, stokes aster (Stokesia laevis) rosettes and the stubby sword-shaped leaves of Peruvian squill (Scilla peruviana) hunkered down, unrepentantly verdant. Even in the blasted vegetable garden, the strawberry plants promised better days on the way. On the other side of the yard, the squirrels have left about 20 buds on the paperbush (Edgeworthia chysantha), and the hardy cyclamen (Cyclamen hederifolium) foliage glowed.

Cyclamen hederifolium,
a bright spot in winter



            Over the years, we occasionally undertook jobs that felt like we’d bitten off more than we could chew once we got to work on the ground. Tim always rallied the troops (me) by saying, “Think like an ant. Concentrate on moving one grain of sand at a time. That’s how we’ll work through this—one grain at a time.” (I always kind of expected him to break into a rousing chorus of “High Hopes,” but he never did.)

            He’s right, though. Doesn’t matter if I’m too tired, too ancient, too flustered, too fluttery, too flummoxed. All I have to do is pick up the grain closest to me, and shift it.

Out-of-control
eleagnus hedge



            Okay, so what if the eleagnus hedge and the wisteria are out of control? I know what to do about that. Whack away. Good stress reliever. So what if my garden is a formless mass of random vegetation? I can handle rearranging that, too, with a plan on paper translated to moving first one plant, then another. Pickleworms threatening the cucurbits again? Plant earlier, keep them under row-cover. January’s traditionally a quiet month for the Fitzes, work-wise: I can use part of that down-time to whip 2011’s gardens into some kind of shape.



            That is, as soon as the temperatures moderate, the wind calms down, those two Carolina Gardener articles get sent out, my neck stops aching and my allergies abate. After all, in addition to being the time of year for resolutions, ’tis also the season for excuses, right?

            Thanks for stopping by. Will let you know how I get on.

                                                                             

                                                                                     Kathy